Energy & Environment

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is responsible for some of the most costly regulations on individuals and businesses. There is virtually no limit to what the unelected bureaucrats at the EPA can do, without congressional oversight or approval. The pursuit of alternative energy should not come at the expense of our current prosperity or freedom. Instead, Americans deserve a common sense energy policy that promotes competition and lowers prices.

Hold Congress Accountable

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Following a report that the Democratic National Committee is considering the inclusion of language endorsing federal investigations into climate change skepticism, FreedomWorks CEO Adam Brandon commented:

In a significant victory for basic law and order, a federal court in Wyoming Tuesday affirmed a basic constitutional concept: that the executive branch must comply with laws passed by Congress. Such is the power and unaccountability of the regulatory state that this counts as news.

In October 2015, the EPA announced a new standard for ground-level ozone, tightening its stringent existing standard even more. It set the new standard at 70 parts per million (0.0070% of the atmosphere), a 9% decrease from the previous standard of 75 ppm established in 2008. Along with nearly 1000 counties nationwide that may not meet this new standard, one-third of all US counties, you’ll find at least 26 national parks. Does it seem ridiculous to you that the EPA has created a situation where some of the most rural and pristine areas of the United States could be lumping in the same category with the most densely-populated and industrialized? Well, then you don’t know the EPA.

Like a crazed serial killer, the liberal green groups are celebrating their “victory” of putting America’s major coal producers out of business — to say nothing of the tens of thousands of miners placed in unemployment lines. Several thousand more mining jobs were lost last month.
Now to get their next homicidal high, the leftists have turned their ambitions on the oil and natural gas industries.

Given the harassment and everyday burdens that federal bureaucrats subject small businesses and families to, it seems obvious that decisions could be challenged by the basic process of judicial review. This right, however, was apparently not entirely evident.
The Supreme Court on Tuesday ruled unanimously in favor of property owners in a decision that weakens the EPA’s authority under the Clean Water Act. The ruling in United States Army Corps of Engineers v. Hawkes Co., Inc gives landowners and businesses the right to go to court when federal regulators trample their rights to property and due process.

On Wednesday, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform held a hearing to examine employee misconduct at the EPA. Misconduct has continued at the EPA despite repeated reform efforts and multiple hearings. Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) opened the hearing by calling the EPA “one of the most toxic places in the federal government to work.” That is a big claim, and one that should alarm conservatives and libertarians who consciously worry about corruption, protectionism, and bureaucracy in the federal government.

There was a time in America — and it wasn’t even so long ago — that liberals actually cared about working class people. They may have been misguided in many of their policy solutions — i.e., raising the minimum wage — but at least their heart was in the right place.

The Department of Energy published data last week with some amazing revelations — so amazing that most Americans will find them hard to believe. As a nation, the United States reduced its carbon emissions by 2 percent from last year. Over the past 14 years our carbon emissions are down more than 10 percent. On a per unit of GDP basis, U.S. carbon emissions are down by closer to 20 percent.

FreedomWorks Foundation’s regulatory reform project is focused not just on mobilizing our activists to engage in advocacy against particularly egregious proposed regulations, but also on educating citizens about the threats posed by the federal regulatory state. The project’s educational mission was made easier by the publication earlier this year of “Liberty's Nemesis: The Unchecked Expansion of the State,” a book by Dean Reuter, Vice President and Director of Practice Groups for the Federalist Society, and John Yoo, Emanuel Heller Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley.